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The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan: Review

A coming of age story set in a jail

Jenni Fagan's The Panopticon, Hogarth/Random House, 288 pages, $24.

Jenni Fagan (Urszula Soltys)

By Nathan Whitlock

Wed., Sept. 11, 2013

As we slowly grow accustomed to state surveillance that sifts through our sexts, Amazon purchases and iTunes software updates to find evidence of criminal intent, a panopticon becomes an irresistible literary metaphor. A panopticon is a prison in which the cells have been arranged in such a way so that they can all be viewed simultaneously by a central watchtower. The idea behind the structure, dreamed up by the 18th century English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, was that nobody even needed to be in the watchtower watching: the inmates had to assume there was someone there, and would conduct themselves accordingly.

In her debut novel, The Panopticon, Scottish poet Jenni Fagan is less interested in the actual panopticon (repurposed as an institution for juvenile offenders) that serves as her book’s setting than in the young creatures who inhabit it against their will. Fifteen-year-old Anias Hendricks is brought there after a female police officer, with whom she has had many encounters, is found beaten and in a coma. Anias must wait to find out if the cop will die — if that happens, she will land in a high-security jail, a fate she believes would very soon kill her. (She’s tough, but sensitive.) She has lived in dozens of foster homes, and has only ever bonded with one surrogate mother, a prostitute named Teresa who was stabbed to death in her bathtub, a loss that is never far from Anias’s thoughts. This has forced her to develop a rich fantasy life full of flying cats and alternate biographies — she thinks constantly about living in Paris, painting the day away and trying to forget all the damage that has been done to her throughout her short life.

Anias also believes she is being manipulated by a shadow conspiracy called The Experiment. This is the group that killed Teresa, who landed her in the panopticon, and who lurk behind the two-way mirrors of its watchtower. She is always trying to catch them out and expose them, and then congratulating them on their ability to ruin everything. The only thing worse than a mysterious group dedicated itself to making you miserable? Not having one. “What if my life was so worthless that it was of absolutely no importance to anyone?” she asks herself.

While she awaits her fate, Anias makes friends with a tough girl who has the distinction of being the institution’s only virgin, and a young gay couple who’d seem too sweet to be true, were it not for the fact that one is a teen prostitute and the other is an HIV-positive self-harmer with two twin toddlers she cannot care for. The novel, with its older-than-her-years narrator on the cusp of a Major Life Moment, its extended cast of oddball kids, and its semi-mythical setting full of dastardly villains, often feels more like young adult fiction than a story for grown ups — Degrassi mashed up with Trainspotting, maybe. There’s even a boat race in which a few of the characters get soaked, and everybody bonds.

Adding to this is the puzzling amount of freedom enjoyed by the boys and girls of the panopticon — they seem to come and go at will, and are often outside its walls, getting up to no good and swearing at each other in mild Scottish dialects. This means the building itself never looms quite as dramatically as it should. Any time the place seems too oppressive, its inmates simply wander into town or climb onto the roof to smoke a joint. Their final, destructive act of rebellion, though emotionally cathartic, suggests that the panopticon was a paper tiger all along. It’s hard to fault the author for wanting to provide her protagonist with a happy ending, given the hell she puts her through, but the novel’s final lapse into wish fulfillment feels like a cop-out. Novelists don’t always have to kill their darlings, but sometimes it’s necessary to lock them away forever.

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Nathan Whitlock is a novelist and the culture editor at Toronto Life magazine.

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